Process Cross-timezone
Engineers across three timezones. Customers in 40 plus countries. The async-first cadence below is what lets a team in Bangalore ship to a customer in Boston without burning anyone out.
Cross-timezone work fails when teams try to force synchronous meetings across overlap windows that do not exist. The async-first cadence below is what makes timezone differences a non-issue. Sync time is reserved for the discussions that actually need it.
The five steps
Five practices that compound. Each one removes a meeting that did not need to be a meeting and replaces it with documentation that anyone can read on their own schedule.
01
During discovery we map your team timezone, your stakeholder timezones, and our engineer timezones. Documented in the engagement plan. No assumed overlap that does not actually exist.
No surprise scheduling fights in week two.
02
Two windows of overlap per week, agreed in writing. One for sprint planning, one for the Friday demo. Everything else is async unless specifically scheduled.
Predictable sync time, the rest of the calendar stays free.
03
Daily Slack updates, written PR reviews, recorded walkthroughs, async design feedback. Sync time is reserved for decisions that need real-time discussion. Most days have no scheduled meetings.
Engineering hours stay engineering hours.
04
Sprint planning needs real-time discussion. Demos benefit from live questions. Discovery interviews need synchronous voice. Hard architectural decisions need a whiteboard. Those get scheduled. Daily standups do not.
Meetings are deliberate, not default.
05
For retainer and enterprise tiers, on-call coverage extends across timezones. EST, PST, IST engineers on rotation for critical issues. Defined escalation paths. Pager only for true emergencies.
Coverage when it matters, quiet when it does not.
Wbcom engineers work from India (IST) by default. Customer-facing leads and partner roles cover EST and PST timezones. The combination gives us 24-hour coverage on critical issues for retainer and enterprise clients, and predictable overlap windows for everyone else.
Slack for daily updates and quick questions. GitHub for code review and issue tracking. Loom for recorded walkthroughs. Basecamp for some longer project conversations. Shared Google Docs for evolving documents.
We adapt to your tooling. If your team lives in Microsoft Teams or Google Chat or Discord, we move there. Async-first works on any platform.
Sprint planning, two hours every two weeks. Friday demo, 30 minutes every week. Discovery interviews, scheduled in the discovery phase. Hard architectural decisions when they come up. That is most of the synchronous work for most projects.
Daily standups across timezones that wreck someone schedule. Open-ended "let me jump on a call" requests. Meetings without an agenda. Status meetings that could have been a Slack message. The async pattern eliminates all of those.
Common questions
EST, PST, IST is our default. We have shipped projects with teams in Sydney, Tokyo, London, São Paulo, and dozens of other cities. The async-first pattern absorbs the timezone gap. Sync overlap windows get harder, but they still work.
Slack is our default because most customer teams already use it. We work in Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, Discord, or Basecamp campfires when customer preference requires. The async-first pattern works on any platform that supports threaded messages.
We schedule sprint planning to fit your team timezone. The Wbcom engineering lead attends live. Other Wbcom engineers attend if the timezone is reasonable for them, otherwise they review the recording and post async questions.
Slack message, named engineer, "blocked, need decision." We respond within four business hours during your timezone for retainer and enterprise tiers. Standard projects get next-business-day response by default.
No. Standard project pricing assumes async-first with two sync windows per week. Retainer and enterprise tiers can include extended sync coverage if your operational requirements need it, priced at the contract level.
Working with a global team and need an async-first partner?
We work with customers in 40 plus countries. Discovery call is free. Scheduled at a time that works for your timezone.
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